And there was a lover crying in the poem, you could hear him crying far away down on the earth, and there were some lines which went: "We two will lie i' the shadow of That mystic living tree Within whose secret growth the Dove Is sometimes felt to be" ...
that made you feel what a strange holy thing love was, after all; and then there was a curious verse with nothing but women's names in it, yet somehow it seemed the loveliest of all; and when again you came out of the voice, you were not crying but feeling wonderfully blest somehow and rather frightened.

Jenny sent a wonderful look to Theophil--it was so they should bathe together in God's sight--and Theophil sent back as wonderful a look as a chairman dare venture on.

Otherwise, of course, it would have been as wonderful as Jenny's.
Thus did Isabel Strange recite at New Zion; and perhaps one can best judge of the impression she made, from the fact that the little boys at the back, who during the last lecture on "Henrik Ibsen" had discovered a most exciting new way of making continued existence possible, quite forgot it and would have to keep it for Sunday afternoon Sunday-school.
Everyone went home in a dream, and little Jenny shone like a light with the excitement and wonder of it all.
"How wonderful you are! Doesn't it seem strange to be so wonderful ?" said Jenny afterwards, as the two girls took off their outdoor things in Jenny's room.
"Dear child!" said Isabel, kissing Jenny on her brow, "it is you that are wonderful." There is no joy in the world better worth seeing, better worth living, than the joy of young people with the same dreams, the same thoughts, and--so important--the same words for them, blown together by some unexpected conjunction of the four winds, met by some blissful dispensation of the planets of youth.
There have been periods in history especially favourable for the ecstasy of such meetings, early mornings of the human spirit, when lovely new truth and lovely new beauty were dawning wild and dewy in the strange east, and while the deep breathing of the older generations still asleep made a more wonderful loneliness of dawn, for the hushed and happy bands of young people holding each other's hands and watching in the magic twilight.
To have been young in Italy in the time of Dante, in England in the time of Shakespeare, and to have met in such a mighty morning--with danger too to keep us grateful.

Ah, we have missed those dawns; and yet I doubt if the whole recovered beauty of Greece and Rome, or the thrilling new fashions in romance and poetry wafted across the seas from Italy to help make Shakespeare, ever gave young people a keener thrill of newness and mystery than the books and pictures so eagerly discussed by the little group that gathered over supper that night in 3 Zion Place.
To have read "The House of Life!"-- to have seen the "Venus Verticordia"! Ah! that was life! And Isabel had actually been to Mr.
G.F.

Watts's studio--walked about there a whole afternoon.